by G.T. Hunt
8909 Grant Street
Bethesda, Maryland 20817
The United Methodist ministry has been the object of much study. The consensus is that the Methodist ministry labors under a fundamentally dysfunctional and antiquated system sufficiently flawed to explain the steady decrease in the size of The United Methodist Church over the past half century.
The system is usually called "itinerancy," referring to the frequent reassignment of ministers. Itinerancy itself has some desirable features: The laity may remain in a local church even though they do not like the preacher, because they believe that he or she will soon be itinerated elsewhere; and clergy reassignments are largely handled by conference officials and involve less of the tedious and often divisive searches and search committees so important in more settled denominations. But Methodist itinerancy as it has developed in practice serves to keep the clergy, and their families, in perpetual uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds timidity. It inhibits the prophetic impulse, especially in internal church matters. An atmosphere of secrecy and the refusal to publish objective rules and standards aggravates the uncertainty and the feeling that the clergy are powerless pawns who had best keep a low profile.
One of the best windows into the world of the Methodist clergy is the United Methodist Clergywomen Retention Study, by Margaret S. Wiborg, Elizabeth J. Collier, and others (Nashville, 1997). Although focused on women, most of its insights apply to men as well. The study was funded by the United Methodist General Board of Higher Education and Ministry in Nashville and carried out through the Anna Howard Shaw Center at the Boston University School of Theology. Copies are available at $6 each from the GBHEM, Attn: Ms. Sandra Lowe, P.O. Box 871, Nashville, Tennessee 37202, and it is on the web at http://www.bu.edu/sth/shaw/retention/index.html.
The Retention Study paints in painful detail the picture of a denomination bitterly at odds with itself. The study does not deal with attrition during the seminary years or during the ordination process, but it reports that ordained clergy leave parish ministry at high rates: In one conference 5 of the 6 women ordained from 1974 to 1983 had left by 1993, for an 83% attrition rate; the median attrition rate for women in all conferences was about 35%; attrition rates for men were about 10% lower. (Retention Study, pp. 1 and 103-104.) "Twenty-five percent of the women who were no longer in ordained ministry at the time of the study left because they believed they could not maintain their integrity in the system . . . Twenty-two percent left ordained ministry because of a perceived lack of support from the system." (P. 17.) "Several women noted that they experienced more support from congregations than from conference officials regarding their ministry." (P. 34.) "The distrust among the United Methodist clergywomen in this study toward district superintendents, bishops, and cabinets as a whole has been the result of personal experiences with the system and its officials who have demonstrated a lack of support for clergywomen and their ministry," particularly in appointments. (P. 32.) "While those in ordained ministry are peers by the fact that they all are ordained clergy, there is a sense that all are not equal colleagues. Rather, there is a political hierarchy in which one's peers have control over one's life or have the potential to someday possess that control." (P. 43.) "In general, . . . the clergywomen in this study left local church ministry because of systemic issues within The United Methodist Church." (P. 57.)
The costs of these systemic issues to the individuals involved, and to their families, are incalculable. A member of the interview transcription team wrote, "I must say that the depth of pain many women expressed about their experiences in ordained ministry were at times unbearable and I would have to stop for a bit and do something else. Some of the stories filled me with rage." (Retention Study, p. iv.) But the costs to a numerically declining denomination are greater. (P. v.) Each discouraged ministry impacts many people, some of whom decide to stop calling themselves Methodist, and some of whom join the growing ranks of Americans who believe it best to avoid organized religion altogether.
(The Retention Study cites and quotes from a study I have not yet found, the Division of Ordained Ministry of the United Methodist Church/Rolf Memming Longitudinal Clergy Study (1997?).)
The consensus that the system is bad for the denomination goes back at least to a 1991 collection of essays Send Me? The Itinerancy in Crisis, edited by Donald E. Messer (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991). Lyle Schaller, who contributed chapter 6 to that collection, wrote, "In several Annual Conferences the beginning point reflects the conclusion that no one is in charge here. The organizational structure is dysfunctional." (P. 93.) Schaller points to the Korean Methodists for the way out: Abandon itinerancy, or at least itinerancy as we have come to know it, itinerancy without security. The Korean Methodists abandoned itinerancy in 1978 and nearly doubled both their membership and number of churches over the next twelve years. (See Send Me?, Chapter 2, "When Korea Abolished Guaranteed Appointments," by Joon Kwan Un.)
Before he or she joins the itinerancy system, a United Methodist called to ordained ministry is subject to a system of selection and exclusion even more dysfunctional. I have met many apparently talented persons who had much to offer the ministry but had been turned away by a board of ordained ministry somewhere along the line. We do not know their number. Either statistics are not kept, or the denomination will not reveal them, but when I did my own unscientific poll of probationary ministers I was astonished at the bitterness and cynicism I encountered, even among those who had survived. One of the kinder comments heard from many probationary ministers was that the boards of ordained ministry behave like college fraternities and sororities, deriving their self-esteem from their power to exclude.
Some of my suggestions for reform focus on the final step, three years or more after probationary ordination: the selection of ministers to be ordained as elders in full connection, full voting members of the conference. 1) In some conferences this selection is done at a one- or two-day retreat by a vote of the full board of 60 or more persons. No organization can afford to turn personnel questions over to the vote of a committee that large. 2) Most of the reasons people hear for rejection are whimsical misimpressions from the retreat (like the woman who was told she did not strike the right level of informality in the required informal dress). But these are people with three years or more in parish ministry, who in any rational system would be judged on their actual performance on the job. 3) And, as reported elsewhere, the rejection rates during the three years I have been watching the process ranged as high as 40% This puts the church in a class with contemporary academia, large law firms, and other business that operate on an up-and-out basis, and are rightly scorned as exploitative and anti-family.
There is a strong consensus that nothing is about to change. As Messer put it in his introduction, there is an "Entrenched morphological fundamentalism -- believing and/or acting as if the current system or organization and activity is divinely ordained and unchangeable . . . " (Send Me?, p. 14.) A United Methodist entering seminary this year may hope to see reform in his or her lifetime, and Paul teaches that hope is one of the abiding virtues. But that seminarian must assume that it is the present system that will determine whether he or she is ordained -- or is cast out like so many others.
At length I have come to see that the selection system is not only flawed in its own terms, it is fundamentally incompatible with my own theology and world picture. In C.S. Lewis' essay "The Inner Ring," he speaks of how those engaged in worthwhile cooperative endeavors often begin to think of themselves as a select few, an inner ring set apart from the common herd. "Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, C.S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: Eardmans, 1977), and http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~dsulliva/classes/lewis/inner_ring.htm. (The gender issue suggested by Lewis' twentieth-century language raises an uncomfortable question: Are women proving any better?) It is a common charge against organized religion that it must have outsiders. As the philosopher Richard Rorty has written, if religion "is disengaged from the opportunity to inflict humiliation and pain . . . it loses interest for many people." Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 157.
The best response is to reaffirm some fundamentals: There is that of God in every person, the Spirit blows where it will, and nobody ever built up an institution by discouraging potential workers. The ordained ministry is entitled to respect, but not the country club respect purchased by excluding others. Those who have been scorned by the United Methodist clergy are the stones the builders rejected. Let us affirm them and make them our corner stones. We may find that we entertain angels unawares.
September 2001
Gaillard T. Hunt 8909 Grant Street Bethesda, Maryland